IRC Bot

2011-02-15

A while ago I started writing a bot for IRC. It will listen to everything that is written in a particular channel, interpret the text, and generate output. I wrote the bot in Perl where there were an easy to use library to use IRC in Perl. The library is called Net::IRC and can for example be downloaded in Debian with the command: apt-get install libnet-irc-perl.

Net::IRC development stopped in 2004, but it works and is easy to use. You can read about how Net::IRC works on CPAN. Do you want to use a newer library with more functionality, you can look at POE::Component::IRC. I will in this article show how a simple bot can be written.

The code is written so that you can copy all the code into a text file and run it. You only need to set the parameters at the beginning of the script. The following code creates a connection to the IRC server: